


The Alphabet Boys Carry On

by PJVilar



Series: Our Year Out of Time Universe [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: F/M, M/M, PTSD, squatterpunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 09:37:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/pseuds/PJVilar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The heart is a doorway. Part One of an ongoing sequel to Our Year Out of Time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Alphabet Boys Carry On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eudaimon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/gifts).



> Long ago and far away, eudaimon bid on me in the 4_a_star auction, asking for 20K of sequel to Our Year Out of Time. I wrote some, stopped, started, stopped again. I'm posting this first section. There will probably be more, but possibly not, and it may arrive out of order. But at any rate, here's the first bit. With all the love in my heart for eudaimon and all the thanks to looleebelle who betaed like a boss and will probably be begged to do so again. Also with many thanks to everyone who may have looked at some or part of this story -- it's been so long I genuinely can't recall. The title comes from "Orphans" by Gaslight Anthem, a song I grew to love after the_liftedlorax included it in the awesome mix for Our Year Out of Time.

Brad

This is what he’s trained for all this time. Unarmed and outnumbered. At least a dozen cops, Doc in zip ties and Tony at his three. Trombley yelling in a tongue he doesn’t understand and a sergeant yelling right back at him, both red-faced and ready to rip someone’s face off. Guns are trained on him.

Somewhere above them, between the pavement and the sky, they are being saved. Brad files this belief away and steps right into the shit.

 

Ray

The rooftops up here are a mix of tar and rubble. All of them take flat drops, no wall built up around the periphery. No safety.

Walt jumps first and Ray goes right after, his coat hanging on by one arm. It flaps behind him like the cape of a battered hero as they run.

 

Nate

They’re at the far edge of the roof when Nate catches sight of them; Walt and Ray scaling the fire escape of 232, one building over, and then scrambling out of sight.

“Brad and Tony aren’t coming,” he says, half to himself. Mike hears him, though, and then there’s a hand on his shoulder pulling him back from his hesitation. Just then, Lilley, crouched down by the front face of Bravo2, shouts out “Holy shit!” and they all go to look.

 

Tony

Every time the cops have come for him before this, Tony’s either had strength in numbers or room to move, or both. He’s been screamed at and called names, pepper sprayed. One time he took a billy club right to the knee. That pains him once in a while, still, like an old dude with gout.

This is the first time he actually gets arrested. It changes things.

 

*

Journal Entry

We think of the heart as a center, a hearth, a place where you can take up residence and dwell. But that’s wrong. The purpose of the heart is not to love. We do that with our being. It’s beyond explanation, not for lack of trying.

The purpose of the heart is to pump blood through the vessels of the body. It’s not a seat of anything, no matter what the Greeks said (and the Romans had their own errant belief of emotion residing in the liver). Nothing sits there, unmoving, making itself at home. Not love, not the soul.

The heart is a doorway. It’s an entry and an exit. What sustains us goes through it, is purified and then let out. It comes back sullied, and is purified again. The heart keeps everything in motion.

In life, you will strive to settle. Once you have, you will strive to move. You will walk in and out of that doorway so many times you’ll wonder, more times than I can possibly warn you about, what the fuck it’s all for, anyway.

Brad. You have the door. You have your heart. The blood still courses through you and through me. It still courses through every other living member of this family we’ve assembled from love, brotherhood, and fear of the alternative. As for the ones who are gone, I’d tell you to carry them. But you already do.

All I know is we are where we are. Sometimes we’ll be tight and cozy in the home we made and sometimes we’ll have to run for our lives in the rain. The second is not a failure of the first. No walls keep the world out, or time.

So remember how to rest. Remember how to run. As for me, my arms are open and my legs are still strong.

Brad. This is so hard, waiting. So much of life is just waiting. And I fucking miss you. But I know you and I’m so much better for it. I know you’ll come home. Happy New Year.

\--Nate Fick  
January 1st, 1997, 3:51 AM

 

*

Brad shows up on a freezing January afternoon with a backpack and a cardboard box that’s been well-taped shut. The sound of the key in the lock is abrupt.

Nate is on his feet before he’s fully aware of what’s happening.

Assessment is not the best mode of operation with someone you love. Nate erases the impulses even as he has them: Brad’s weight, the bags beneath his eyes. His hands are still and not shaking. But they’re patchy red from cold and pressure.

Nate heard him out there, digging out the front walk. It took everything in him not to call out.

The signs were clear. Brad was working his way back in.

“Hi,” Brad says. His voice is whisper-soft with roughness in it. A disused, early morning voice.

“Brad,” Nate whispers, as if he can’t believe it. But somewhere in him was the knowledge this moment would come. He stands in the kitchen, the only warm room in the apartment right now. They’ve been keeping the boiler running on a wide berth during the day since barely anyone is there.

Brad’s hard to read, bundled up in his coat, hands full. But Nate can see his eyes as they skim around the room and warm to the familiarity. Brad’s gaze then moves to Nate’s hair, shaved close in the bathroom sink just the other night.

An eyebrow crooks. Nate is hit with pure joy, unexpected. Ridiculous.

“I needed a change,” Nate says, his fingers running through his own scruff.

“Oh,” Brad says.

“Here,” Nate says and pulls the box out of his hands. He sets it on the kitchen table.

His uncertainty gets pulled off along with his coat and Brad’s lips are pressed down beside Nate’s ear by the time he says it.

“I came home,” he says. “If—“

Anything that would follow is unneeded. It would hurt too much to hear it, a question of whether Nate would take him back. As if Brad was ever given up. So it’s Nate’s mouth on his and Nate’s hands warming his and soon enough just the faintest hiss of gas heat from the stove keeps them from freezing while they find their way back to each other, on the cracked linoleum floor.

*

Full dark comes by five o’clock these days. The snow kicks up again outside, fat tufts of it blowing back against the bedroom window.

Ray’s been busy – too busy – running through his personal list of necessities for the building before he heads down to Virgina to see Walt. From there he’ll go straight to basic training.

He’ll get back when he gets back. But in the meantime, he ran floodlights all along the perimeter on each floor, facing the street. A good deterrent, Ray says. He said it over and over while Tony stood out there with a headlamp in twenty degrees, bitching his face off while Ray tested and rewired and re-angled all night long. Of course, they got it done.

The upshot of this is now, in full dark, the blown back snow is lit up from underneath. Nate can see the changes in wind, can see the flakes seemingly clump together and then scatter a hundred different ways.

The rattle of the heat kicking in for the night is what slowly leads Brad back to consciousness. Within a few minutes, he’s sidled over a little closer to Nate, then moves his palm into what’s left of Nate’s hair.

“You can go back to sleep if you need to,” Nate says but he kisses Brad’s temple right after he says it. In truth, he wants to stay up all night and then some.

“It’s okay, sir,” Brad says. He leans up on his elbows and rubs his nose into Nate’s neck. “I’m not traumatized this time.”

Before Nate turns away from the window and back to Brad, he sees the snow lift up beneath a wind current all at once, as if erased.

They don’t leave the apartment for three days. It’s not something that happened before; it’s not something that ever happens again.

“I want you to know,” Brad starts, awkwardly. He’s drinking tea, which as far as Nate knows he doesn’t even like but there’s no hot chocolate here. He’ll have to go shopping soon so he can add Brad to the cabinets and the little half-refrigerator. Oatmeal, bacon, grapefruit. Hot chocolate. Beef jerky and fruit leather.

Nate gets a declaration, just not the one he’s expecting.

“I want you to know, I want all the news. I want to hear about Ray and if Walt’s okay and what’s going on with the squat. I don’t want you to think I don’t care about them.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Okay,” Brad says. His hands skate over Nate’s naked sides, his fingers trace Nate’s ribs firmly. There’s nothing tentative in his touch, but it does feel like he’s never seen Nate naked before. And that’s far from the case.

“I just want this first,” he says. Nate barely hears him since Brad’s lips are against his neck.

God, they fell so hard.

Nate arches his back and smiles lazily. He feels like a newly unwrapped present. He slides his calf over Brad’s beneath the covers, brings his leg up to rest against Brad’s knot of a hip.

 

*

 

The chill of the nights has a dullness to it now. Brad’s feet don’t hurt when he presses them up against Nate’s shins at night; they’re just cold. He’s getting used to everything, still slowly coming home.

Sleeping two to a bed has been easier than he thought it would be.

There’s a thunk by Brad’s head and he grumbles lazily. When it happens a second time, then he’s annoyed. He pushes at Nate’s sternum, the same way he does to make the snoring stop. The snoring Nate insists he does not emit.

“Nate. Come on.”

He expects a sleepy “What?” or maybe an apology. Instead, he gets a fist to the face and then he’s really, really awake.

In the light from the street, Brad can see the shadows on the bedside table are out of order. The silhouette is different. Nate has reared back, twisted away from Brad this time, and his arm sweeps past the table to connect with the wall. He screams but it doesn’t sound like pain. It sounds like war movies Brad’s seen, where soldiers come running out from cover to shoot their enemies to Hell.

Brad throws his arms around Nate and calls his name but Nate slides out of his arms and to the floor. Brad jumps out of bed but when he looks down Nate is flailing and rolling around, making horrible senseless noises, an animal in pain.

He runs from the room, crushing something up into the sole of his foot as he does but he runs anyway, out the door and up the stairs. He knows when he’s beat. This is not a one-man job.

Brad slaps Tony’s door as hard as he can, palm flat like he’s killing ants. This is at least the third time he’s encountered Tony in the dead of night with no clothes on. Through his panic, Brad has the concrete thought that he should invest in a pair of pajamas, if only so he has something to wear when he and Tony barge in on each other at crack of ass hundred in the morning. It’s sure to happen again. There’s always something.

“What is it?” Tony whispers fiercely. They always assume the worst. It tends to have the effect of keeping them alive.

“Nate won’t wake up.”

Tony’s forehead seems to draw down into his eyebrows. Brad wants only to run back down the stairs to Nate, tugging Tony along by the hand, but Tony is frozen in shock.

“He took something?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Brad says, his voice rising rapidly in volume. “It’s like he’s having a seizure.”

And like that time starts going at it’s normal rate again. Maybe even faster. “Okay,” Tony says. He reaches back behind the door for something, then reappears with his keys held tight in his fist. He doesn’t lock his door behind him, though. They tear down the stairs together and back into Brad’s apartment.

Brad turns on the light in the front room first. Everything is sharper than real life, too high a resolution. He expects if he looks at the kitchen wall as he passes in the hallway, flicking another light switch, he’ll be able to see every crack in the wall. He hears his breath in his ears and nothing else – no sounds of Nate from the bedroom – as he passes the living room and bathroom. He systematically flicks those switches too, and swallows. It’s just a matter of routine by the time Brad gets to the bedroom and switches on the overhead light they never use.

Beneath the bare bulb, Nate winces and covers his eyes with his arm. It’s possible, at least, to make some sense of what exactly happened in the room a few minutes before. Everything from the bedside table is in disarray. Most of Nate’s books are on the floor. There’s a dented pill bottle on the floor, either Nate’s acidophilus or his echinacea. Miraculously, a teacup of water is still balanced perfectly in it’s place, half-full.

“Cut the lights,” Nate barks out, an order. Tony does it before Brad can protest. He grunts and goes to the window and rolls the blind up enough that some light can slice in from outside. Nate drops his arm but otherwise remains still on the floor where he fell or. . .crawled? Jesus.

Brad kneels down beside Nate. Something small and hard immediately digs into his knee but his guess is it’s not broken glass, so he just ignores it for now. Behind him, Tony lumbers around as quietly as he can, shuffling fallen papers and picking up pill bottles.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. Something went off outside. It just startled me.”

Brad glances back at Tony and shakes his head. No, that’s not it.

“Okay,” Brad says, swallowing hard against the truth. He starts to slip his hands beneath Nate’s armpits, but Nate squirms away.

“I’m fine,” he snarls, nothing Brad has ever heard before. He pulls his hands back and places them on the floor behind Nate.

“Don’t fight me,” he says quietly. After a moment Nate nods his head and clasps Brad’s hand. They struggle to their feet together. As he turns around the room to get his bearings, Nate catches sight of Tony.

“You heard it, too?”

“Yeah,” Tony replies. “Brad came and got me.”

“Oh. I’m sure it was nothing.” Nate unthreads his hands from Brad’s and shuffles back toward the bed and sits. Without another word, he lies down. Brad can’t see his eyes but Nate’s head lolls on the pillow a couple of times and it seems that he’s heading towards at least a light sleep. He leans down by Nate’s ear.

“I’ll be right back,” he whispers. Nate doesn’t respond. Tony is already in the hallway. Brad takes a pair of cargo pants from one of his milk crates in the corner and slides into them before he follows.

He walks into the corner of the living room, far from the doorway, and pulls the cord on the standing lamp there behind the armchair. It’s Nate’s, mustard-colored cordouroy with a military-issue blanket folded crisply across the back. Even without Nate in the room, Brad finds it hard to sit there. Instead he chooses the couch and gestures for Tony to sit beside him.

“Did this happen while I was gone?”

“No,” Tony responds.

Brad glares hard because he knows how they are, bound and shit. They’re brothers of Bravo 2 and all, but in the end Tony would keep a secret for Nate. Tony would lie to his face, for Nate.

But Tony holds his palms out in a gesture of I’ve got nothin’. The couch shifts beneath them, not a creak so much as an exhale. He was only away a month and a half and Tony looks much, much older. “Not that I’ve seen and not that he’s said. But you should ask him.”

Another moment of not looking away from Brad’s hard stare and Brad believes him. If Tony doesn’t know, nobody knows. Maybe Nate doesn’t even know.

Tony stands and paces to the window, then looks back. “He didn’t have anything to drink?”

“No. Does he get like that when he drinks?” Brad’s heard stories, nothing like this. But Tony’s shaking his head,.

“Just stupid.” He shrugs and plants his ass against the window sill, not quite sitting down. “But I don’t have another explanation.” Tony holds his fists out in front of himself and then shakes them out. When he looks back up at Brad there’s a hint of a sly smile.

“What?” Brad spits it out harder than he means to, but Tony being friendly just makes his hackles rise.

“Nothing,” he replies and jerks his thumb in the direction of the bedroom. “I don’t see you guys alone very much.”

No fucking intel and now Tony’s getting introspective. Brad wants to bitch about something, the cold or how scared he is, but Tony is being completely sincere and there’s no point in being an asshole.

“This is not a great example.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. He stands and leans over to Brad, who tries to rise gracefully. “I get it, though.”

Brad follows him out like he’s a guest or something, and there’s Gina standing in the hall, front door still wide open behind her. She’s got sneakers on, a windbreaker. Ready to go.

“Hey,” she says and takes a tentative step forward. “I knocked on Tim’s door but he’s either not home or not answering.”

“Not home,” Brad and Tony say in unison. Tony pats Brad on the shoulder one more time and then goes toward Gina.

“Is Nate okay?” she asks, directing to question to Brad. Tony kisses the side of her face and she looks up at him.

“I think so,” Brad says quietly. He slides his hands into the pockets of his pants and watches them. They’re like two trees twined together at the roots, even if you can’t see it above ground. He wonders if he and Nate are anything like that, if that’s what Tony can see with his fucking x-ray vision.

“He doesn’t need a doctor?” she says to Tony, but he already has an arm around her waist, guiding her back out the door.

“No, baby. He’s all right. Brad, you need anything—”

“Thanks. Gina, thanks.”

“Sure. Night, Brad.”

After the door is locked and barred, after the lamp is snapped off. Brad wanders back to the bedroom and steps out of his pants and underwear somewhere along the way. His body feels like it’s too hot, like his motion could show up as a smudged red line, fading out behind him as he goes. With this heat he slides back into bed next to Nate. If nothing else, he can help Nate stay warm. They don’t always curl up together, not often at all in fact. Brad lies there in the dark, watching Nate breathe in what appears to be a state of peace. Nate would wrap around him like a blanket every night, he thinks, if he gave an okay to the ever-unspoken question.

Brad slides his arm over Nate’s side, beneath the covers, and presses up behind him. It feels like it’s time, maybe to admit that this is where he lives.

When Brad is almost out, he feels Nate shimmy back against him slightly, relaxing into him as if he’s the bed itself.

Brad has already made a habit of waking as early as Nate; 6 a.m. most mornings. Even if he doesn’t know what he’s doing with himself yet, this isn’t a vacation. So far he’s fallen into washing the dishes as Nate makes breakfast and figuring out how to brew the superior cup of coffee in this operation.

Nate hunches over his oatmeal, a big bowl of it with bananas and apples cooked so long they’re practically candy. It’s like any other January morning of the few they’ve had so far. Too dark and too cold everywhere but the steamy kitchen, with all the smells that are the essence of home. In fact, everything is too status quo, Brad eventually realizes.

“So, what happened last night?” he says casually, setting down his mug.

“I don’t know,” Nate says around a mouthful, then swallows. He grins and wipes at his mouth with the dishtowel tossed on the table after he cooked. “A car backfired or something.”

Brad takes his mug over to the sink and breathes until the words punch through to the air between them.

“Nate. There was no noise. And you reacted like you wanted to take my head off.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’m telling you that you did. You took a series of swings at me. You made contact, Nate, and I couldn’t wake you up. It was like you were altered.”

Instead of reaching him, that word “altered” makes Nate draw back like it burns. Brad learned it from him in the first place, from his stories about dealing with junkies and people who were too high to be dealt with.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you but it was an error. An accident. It was probably just a bad dream. That’s all. I’m sorry.”

He’s got his jackets and boots on, bag shouldered and is out the door before the sun’s fully out. Well before Brad can process what the fuck just happened.

It’s time to go outside. Not leave, just go outside. Go elsewhere and figure out his own map, what his days will look like. They have to look like something. They can’t just look like a reaction to Nate’s days. Clearly.

 

*  
“So let me make sure I understand your retardese, here. You can’t swim.”

The public pool is less scary than Brad would have thought. It’s pretty clean. The scariest thing about it is how many of the men in their speedos and goggles resemble his Zadie Leon. He focuses on Ray.

“Nah, Brad, I couldn’t swim before,” Ray answers. A whistle sounds from one of the lifeguards, but Ray just keeps slapping the side of his head to dislodge water while he speaks. “I can swim now.”

Brad sighs and removes the scratchy white towel from around his neck. He reaches behind them on the bench and hangs it on a hook. “You can do a crawl now, barely,” he says, stretching his borrowed swim cap over his head. “And you can tread water. Until you get too tired or cranky.”

Ray sighs in a creepy, erotic way and says, “Finally,” meaning the water finally got out of his ear. They rise together and walk over to the empty of the two slow lanes. The tiles and the pool reflect light off each other in a way that makes the whole place look like it’s lurching back and forth just enough to be unnerving.

Ray turns and descends the short ladder while Brad nags him some more.

“You joined the Marines and you can’t fucking swim,” Brad says. He jumps down from the top step and glances over at the guard on the shallow end -- not busted. “I would say this is unbelievable but this is you we’re talking about. You live in that painting where the clocks are always melting.”

Ray inhales and plunges underwater, then comes up. There’s nothing goofy about it, and that’s just unusual. “Screw you, Colbert,” he says, wiping down his hair. “I was second best shot in BCES and my physical conditioning was awesome going in. But yeah, I can’t swim so good. It’s actually more common than you might think.”

Brad walks out a few paces until the water is at his mid-section, then follows Ray’s example and dunks under. When he comes up he asks, “How’d you learn as much as you did?”

Ray’s smirking when Brad wipes his eyes. “Guess.”

“Nate.”

“Ten points for Iceman,” Ray replies. A tall, slender woman in a rash guard ducks under the rope next to them, nods, and ducks under the next one, heading for a faster lane. “Rudy came with us the first time. Nate thought it would calm me down or something. Instead I got into a fistfight with him in the shallow end.”

“You and Rudy?” Brad says.

“Yeah, man, it was bad. We all got thrown out, which is no fun in a swimsuit in December.” Ray bounces in place a couple of times, then pushes forward into a crawl. He stops after a few strokes and Brad glides up next to him.

“I cannot picture him hitting anybody.”

Ray shrugs, head tipped to one side. “I don’t blame him,” he says. “I threw the first punch. His breaststroke pissed me off.” Ray cups his hands over his nose and blows hard, getting out whatever water he inhaled in the last five seconds. Brad looks at the ceiling. It offers no advice.

“Anyway,” Ray continues, “After that, Nate took me through the basics. Even got me out to Coney Island on New Year’s Day.”

 

“Why?”

“Polar Bear club, homes,” Ray says with a grin. He starts to bounce in place again, psyching himself up. “Froze my nuts off.”

Brad stifles a sigh even though the image pleases him. Ray throwing himself into an ice-cold sea, bitching and moaning all the way. Nate happy on New Year’s Day.

“So,” he says. “What do you need me to do?”

Ray looks surprised by the question but schools his face quickly back to wise-ass. “Just tell me what I’m doing wrong,” he says. “I figured that would totally be your bag.”

Brad turns onto his back and pushes out into a float. “If I could only get paid for that,” he says loftily.

Ray starts to follow in a breaststroke. It’s not bad. “What are you doing about that? Getting paid, I mean.”

Brad takes a couple of strokes and then stops so Ray can catch up. “There’s Empire City. There’s Rudy’s. It’s work. Pay my own.”

“I don’t know, man,” Ray says. “I think you need more than that.”

Ray takes a big gulp of air and shimmies beneath the water’s surface.

“I need more than that,” Brad admits, and watches Ray make the length.

###


End file.
